MUSIC FESTIVALS: The weather captured headlines all year long but, ever optimistic, young and old alike took their chances on the outdoor music festival circuit writes Eoin Butler
IN PERHAPS THE most celebrated passage of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson described mid-1960s San Francisco as a time and place where he could jump on his motorcycle, drive in any direction and find debauched parties raging at any hour of the day or night.
Standing at the top of a hill in Nevada, half a decade later, he looked west. "With the right kind of eyes" he wrote, "you can almost see the high water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Drawing any serious parallels between hippy-era Haight-Ashbury and Celtic Tiger Ireland would obviously be a fatuous exercise. But they were alike in one respect at least. Both were times and places when people liked to party. And whenever possible, they liked to party out-of-doors. Such was the proliferation of outdoor music festivals here in this decade, that at times it seemed one could hardly swing a cat in an Irish field without bumping into an ambient disco or an organic hot dog stand.
The years 2003 to 2008 will likely be remembered, by promoters and punters alike, as a golden era for live music in this country. We've had everything from country music in Athboy, jazz rap in Ennis and trance in Mullingar. But this summer was the moment the wave broke and the tide finally began to recede.
Not that you'd have thought as much a lot of the time. The market leaders, Oxegen (headlined this year by Kings of Leon and The Verve) and the Electric Picnic (George Clinton, the Sex Pistols), were both adjudged to have had some of their most successful outings to date this year. But overall, the story of the summer had to be the bloody awful weather.
There had been wet summers in the past, to be sure. But for sheer misery, this one will live long in the memory. The nadir may have been the Love Box event, which took place in blustery conditions in a half-empty Marlay Park in August. London reggae outfit Trojan Sound System summed up the prevailing mood that day when they kicked off their set with the words "Alright Dublin, it's pretty cold. So let's just get started, yeah?" Later they promised, in a thick Jamaican accent, that "The more you dance, the more the sun come out." Those who took them at their word were sorely disappointed, as the heavens promptly opened again. Just a week after the end of the 2008 festival season, the US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed. The ensuing financial crisis is already affecting the outlook for next year.
At the time of writing, early bird tickets for Oxegen 2009 have not sold out and, unusually for this time of year, headliners have not yet been confirmed.
Oxegen, of course, is a well established post-Leaving Cert rite of passage for tens of thousands of young people ever year. With the financial muscle of MCD behind it, it is likely to endure well into the future.
But down the food chain, smaller festivals will likely struggle to survive. Already this year we've seen events like Midlands and The Garden Party fail to reappear. Others went ahead, but with diminishing returns. Many of these may not be back next year.
Furthermore, with the advent of the O2 arena in Dublin's docklands, promoters may elect to move one off events indoors.
So has the death knell sounded for the outdoor music festival? Let's hope not. Putting tens of thousands of people from diverse backgrounds together in such close quarters is a unique experience - a sort of corporate-sponsored Haight-Ashbury, if only for one weekend. This writer's favourite festival story from 2008 involved a couple in their late 20s who hired a camper van for one festival. They found themselves parked next to a group of pupils from a well-known Dublin boarding school.
By day these boys comported themselves like the polite, well-educated young men that they were. By night, they transformed into something resembling a deranged, post-apocalyptic death cult.
The final straw for my friend Samir came at 6am, when he heard a well-to-do Dublin accent shouting "For God's sake Conor - you're p***ing in the tent! Not cool, man . . . Not cool." He roused himself from his sleeping bag, slipped the van into reverse and made an executive decision to relocate to another corner of the field.
Where else would you make such happy memories?